Wine's first family, open-minded Brits, and
friends of the corktree
8 June 2007
The first family
Poor old Oscar (Wilde, not Foulkes) once remarked: ‘I am not
young enough to know everything’, and as I’m that bit more elderly than he
ever was, it must apply even more to me. I see the brash confidence of youth and can
but sigh with admiration when they tell me things.
Take young Jenny Ratcliffe-Wright who’s just written that
quaintly dirty book about wine that older men seem to like so much (she
managed to get enthusiastic pre-publication puffs from arch-enemies Michael
Fridjhon and John Platter, which shows the infinite variety of her charm;
the rather ghastly David Bullard and the rather nice David Biggs were the
other two not-so-young chaps who made up the contingent supplying puffs for the cover of
Spit or Swallow). Well, Jenny is only too clearly related to
Mike-the-First Ratcliffe (whom I’ve mentioned before), presuming that such
things as an obsession with primacy is sign of kinship. And she’s as
mistaken as he sometimes is, when she claims in the blurb of her little book
that her Mamma, Norma Ratcliffe of Warwick, ‘was South Africa’s first female
winemaker’.
Well, no, Jenny. There was, at the very least, Janey Muller making
wines first at Lievland from 1982 (it's described very particularly in the
1983 edition of Platter), then at Lemberg, well before Norma's first
bottlings came on the
scene. A long time back … I remember it well.
British fair-mindedness
I should warn local producers and their British agents to not
try selling anything to a retailer named Richard Ballantyne in Cardiff. In a
little profile in the trade journal Off Licence News (more interesting than
you’d guess from the name), Richard was asked to name the most overrated
wine in the UK market. His answer: ‘anything from South Africa’. Revealing
yet more winning charm, this pale and podgily ugly person (judging by the
little photo) answered the
question about whom he would ideally choose to be prime minister, with a
prompt ‘Margaret Thatcher’. Clearly, like so many of his fellow Brits in the
wine business, his right-wing credentials are impeccable. Probably he’d have
preferred Cape wines in the days before 1994.
Friends of Quercus suber
Big, brash Emile Joubert – who should be forgiven a lot, but
certainly not everything, because he is often funny (ha-ha), and that is a
rare blessing in this wine business where the funniness is mostly of the
funny-peculiar type – Emile has winged his way to Portugal. He’s the guest of
the cork industry, which has been assiduously wooing
journalists in recent years as it watched in dismay the increasing
dissatisfaction with corks and the concomitant rise in esteem for screwcaps.
It’s only a week or two since, as readers of Emile’s column
in Rapport will know, that he wrote a story about screwcaps in which
he reported on a scare story by a long-term anti-screwcap writer in New
Zealand suggesting a link to breast cancer (a link vigorously rejected by
most commentators, as far as I can see, and oncologists seem agreed that
even if there were something in it, you’d have to drink the contents of so
many screwcapped bottles that you’d not only be seriously sloshed for a
century, you’d
also be dead from liver damage long before the cancer came). But probably
this international invocation of the C-word in connection with screwcaps is
giving the cork manufacturers who’re hosting Emile’s little holiday the
happiest smiles they’ve had for ages.
Of course, I wouldn’t dream of suggesting that the articles
by this PR consultant-cum-journalist are ever remotely connected with
anything other than his desire to convey truth to his readers. This
particular story, concluding with advice to not throw away your corkscrews,
was pretty biassed in favour of corks, I’d say – and I'm the last to say we’re
not all entitled to
our opinions. But it does occur to me to wonder what would have happened if
Emile had heard that a fan of screwcaps was making
publicity-seeking statements about a possible cancer scare associated
vaguely with corks. Would he have found that of equally compelling news value,
a few weeks before going on his freebie from the cork producers? I’m just
wondering. I do hope he’s having a suber time in the land of the tree.
Sadly, even though I’m not entirely convinced by the screwcap
ayatollahs myself, the cork manufacturers haven’t yet offered to fly me over
to marvel at their forests and be fully convinced. Generally Amorim doesn’t seem
to like Grape people much. Last year, for example, our News Editor (who
doesn’t like pieces of bark in his bottles one little bit, and has accused
the Proper Editor of being a closet corkist) had been asked to
go to the lunch-party provided by the massive cork producer as part of their sponsorship of
Wine mag’s bubbly competition. Then came the phonecall saying that,
sorry, after all he wasn’t
on the list … so no freebie lunch for our Melvyn.
Our splendid certifiers
I read with sadness the
piece by young Chris
Mullineux (ex of Tulbagh Mountain Vineyards, now set to start a new
winemaking life in the Swartland along with Andrea, to whom he's getting
married in the US more or less as I write) about the dificulty of getting
his best wines approved by the Wine and Spirit Board. I hear that André van
Rensburg, Hero of the Helderberg, was much relieved when he got a 'quality
warning' about one of his pet Vergelegen wines: when the Board think there's
a real problem with your wine, he was heard to say complacently, you know
you're doing right.
Cheers. I’m off to get my corkscrew. So useful for stabbing
people with, don’t you think?
